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Thursday, March 14, 2013

Olive oil soap with Cinnamon and Cocoa

Olive oil soap with cinnamon and cocoa

Once you are 'hooked' on soap making you will always be in the process of planning your next recipe, thinking about different things you could use to give them fragrance or color. You will want to try all those exotic oils, butters or essential oils you've read about or seen while browsing your supplier's catalogue. Those ingredients don't come cheap however, so more often than not, when you feel the need to spend some creative fun time making soap, you will have to work with simple ingredients, those you can find in your kitchen any time. Sometimes simple is better, so take that Olive oil and whatever spices or dried herbs you have in your kitchen and have some fun.Chalkidiki is famous for it's green olives and where I live, people use their own olive oil for cooking, baking and even frying. That being the case, I always have some good, healthy (and unexpensive) olive oil available to use when I feel like experimenting with soap making. I had very little palm oil left and decided to use it too. In this case I wanted to make something that would look and smell delicious. Something akin to chocolate cake. So what better to use than cocoa? I was browsing on the Internet to see how others have implemented cocoa in CP soaps, how much was enough and how did it turn out and I already had an idea about making it look like my kids favorite cake, which is half dark, with cocoa - half white, scented with orange, so evidently the process would be similar, but then I stumbled upon this recipe in Greek, which was similar to what I imagined doing, except it was with cinnamon and cocoa, not orange. I made a small alternation and divided the soap mixture in half, adding couple of tea spoons cinnamon to one half and couple of tea spoons of cocoa to the other, a bit more than the recipe suggested, so my soap looks darker, smells to die for and looks good enough to eat.

I used 7cm x 9cm x 12cm tupperware instead of mold, which gave me 6 bars of soap, aprox. 2cm thick and 100-110 g. weight. I had some soap extra, so I poured it into 4 cupcake molds, about 40 g. each. Always have some extra molds or plastic cups in case you're not sure exactly how much weight can your mold take.

Warm the palm oil and add it to the olive oil. Add caustic soda to distilled water as usual and wait until both oils and lye cool down to the same temperature. I mix them when they both reach 35° Celsius (95° Fahrenheit). If this is your first time making CP soap, here are some things you need to know before making soap. Then, when you are ready, I've described the basic soap making process here.

After your mixture reaches light 'trace' add 1 table spoon confectionary suger which helps with the insulation process, then divide it into two bowls, preferably those with handles, and add 3 tea spoons of cinnamon powder to one of them, and 3-4 tea spoons of cocoa powder to the other bowl. Mix them separately until they incorporate evenly into the mixture. Now you're ready to pour this into the mold. This is where bowls with handles come handy, because you need to pour both mixtures into mold at the same time. Now take a spoon or a wooden stick and do some gentle zig-zagging with it in order to stir the two parts lightly. You can awoid this altogether and just add cinnamon and cocoa together into your bowl, but I wanted to see how the colors would turn out. As you can see in the photos, the difference is more visible in cupcake soaps, where cocoa is down and cinnamon on top, because I couldn't pour them at the same time.

Put your soap for insulation as described in the basic soap making process, unmold and cut after 24h and then comes the hardest part - waiting for the soap to cure, which in this case, because it's mostly an olive oil soap, will probably take more than 4 weeks. Good luck!